Can the White House lead a cleanup crusade when it has had dubious deals of its own? You be the judge

The Bush White House is strictly top-of-the-organizational-chart, an outfit run by corporate bosses: Dick Cheney from Halliburton, the oil-services giant; Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill from Alcoa; and Commerce Secretary Don Evans from the Denver oil-and-gas outfit Tom Brown. These are capitalists who know how to make a buck and were never ashamed of it.

They never had to be, until the corporate trust scandals landed on the President and Vice President like a sack of nickels. At issue is whether the two men benefited during their business careers from the same kind of cronyism and slippery accounting that the Administration is...